North Shore Yogalates

North Shore Yogalates was a web site promoting a yoga teacher in Auckland NZ, and disseminating useful information about yoga poses and philosophies. (Site is no longer active)

The site needed to be "smooth", mellow, with natural textures and symbols, to reflect the style of the teacher. "Dru" yoga is a style which emphasises calmness and avoids the more strenuous exercises of some other schools. It was also useful to publicise the class dates and locations in North Shore, Auckland, NZ.

The teacher was starting from scratch and so publicity and visibility was essential. We were fortunate to secure the ideal domain name which has exactly the words required to convey the site. This is a big plus for search engines. As with all my sites, HTML validation was ensured as well as use of keywords within the headings. After launch we made small improvements but the basic structure has remained, and the site has very gradually improved in Google rankings over a few months. On most of the target search rankings, the site has performed much better than expected, especially when searching for "yoga" plus a relevant placename. It is on page one of Google for a couple of key searches.

Google Picasa Gallery

As something of a bonus or side-show, we added a small photogallery of "inspirational" pictures. The gallery was built using Google''s excellent Picasa 2 free package - we customised a Picasa template to resemble the rest of the site, while retaining sufficient difference to indicate that you are in a separate section. The gallery has the added advantage of providing an excuse to insert some extra place-related placenames, which is a small boost for the Google localisation.